His stint on Christmas Island in 1958 earned him a posting back to England where he was put in charge of the RAF Cadet School in London. He retired as Group Captain in 1970 and became an instructor in the Saudi Air Force for three years. During his career he had flown 36 types of planes and had 2,300 hours in jets and fighters. He lived in Spain and then settled in Andorra; the climate suited his by now frail health.
Charney was a modest hero and was reluctant to talk about his war experiences. He left that to his Andorran friends who were in awe of his bravery. Whenever anyone broached the subject his stock reply was, “there were far braver men than me.”
He met June, his future wife, in a café in the little village of L’Aldosa three thousand feet up in the Pyrenees in the La Massana parish of Andorra. She was sitting in a corner silently sipping a coffee with a lively group of people. Born in South Africa, June had decided to live in England following the break-up of her marriage, and was on an adventure holiday in Europe when she decided to stay awhile in Andorra.
She recalled: “Ken was a good 10 years older than me, but I was attracted to him straightaway. I heard all these stories about him being a war hero and all that, but I found him to be very shy and not at all boastful. In many ways he seemed lost to me, and one day he told me why. His brow sort of darkened and he told me he had been to a place that no-one should have been sent to. I thought he was talking about somewhere in the war years. But he said, ‘no… that’s not it.’
“He told me he had been sent to a tiny dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Christmas Island for a number of years. Ken was the personal assistant to the officer commanding on the island and was involved in all these bombs going off. I distinctly remember him saying the whole place was ‘red hot.’ He said between the bombs there wasn’t much to do except swim in the lagoons and drink. He used to take a lot of photographs. And he was fascinated with the birds. He became very friendly with the reverend on the island. They played a lot of chess. When the bombs started going off, I don’t think he was overly concerned. He wasn’t enamoured to be there, but it was his job.
“Ken used to swim a lot and of course there was an awful lot of coral there. And one day after an enormous bomb went off he cut himself on the coral, all down his side, and of course all that rotten water went in there. He said it was just after the ‘big one’, a bomb that shook the whole island. He said it was quite amazing. He laughed when he said the bigwigs must have known something because they all skedaddled before the explosion.
“Ken was in one of the forward positions, in a bunker. The only way he could see was through a sort of mirror. He said nothing in the war terrified him as much as this one; he really thought he was going to die. The bunker shook like mad. When he got cut by the coral, he landed in hospital, but it all turned nasty. He knew that water was very contaminated and often worried about it. But Ken had such a zest for life that he just laughed it off. He said we all had to die, and in the meantime he planned to carry on living life to the full.”
This he proceeded to do, although even then his health was already failing. “He told me he would never go to the doctors. He was always afraid of what they might find. He said that even while he was jet-setting between England and the continent he felt the sword of Damocles hanging over him.” Not long after he married June, Charney began to lose weight and his hair thinned alarmingly. “We both knew he was very sick, but we never discussed it and I am so sorry that we never did. All he would say is that he was doomed after swimming in the lagoon.
“About three or four years before he died he was bedridden for much of the time. It was so degrading for a man like him; I used to cry alone looking at some old photographs that showed him as he was in the RAF. I didn’t realise it then, but this was the onset of leukaemia. I’m not a medical person, but all the signs were there. He knew what was wrong with him, but he was too frightened to face it. We tried to brush it aside and even went to South Africa for Christmas; we went out for three months and we took an apartment. He loved it so much he wanted to buy a place. But, of course, he was too ill. He said to me one day, about a month before he died, that he hadn’t got long and that I should start thinking about my future. We both cried like babies and he cursed what he called that ‘dot’ in the middle of the Pacific.
Ken Charney, died on June 3, 1982, aged 62. An inept local doctor certified the cause of death as heart failure. No other cause was given. Apart from his pension, Charney had little to show for his 30 years service in the RAF. What savings he had went on paying a few bills and tying up his affairs. He had few personal possessions except for one intriguing item: a small leather-bound suitcase that he always kept carefully under his bed.
June said: “Ken always said the content of the case was dynamite and that I should never open it. I thought he was joking, of course, and I thought I had better open it to see if there was anything important. I found a couple of Dunhill pipes and some RAF insignias and a brooch. There was also a mass of official looking paperwork, but I was in deep mourning and didn’t take any notice of them. I contacted Ken’s old squadron and asked them if they would like the badges for their museum. I also told them about the paperwork. Out of the blue two women appeared on my doorstep. I was surprised because I’d only sent the letter a couple of days previously.
“They asked me if they could look into Ken’s case to see if there might be “anything of interest”. I saw no reason not to let them, and they rummaged around for a while. One of them started asking me about Ken, and she was delighted when I said they could have his insignia’s and brooch for the museum. The other just read all the papers. They stayed for quite a while and we parted on very good terms. They took all Ken’s things with them, including the papers. The badges ended up in his old squadron’s museum, but I have no idea what happened to the papers.”
Mrs Charney moved back to London and thought no more about Christmas Island until she saw an item in a newspaper about nuclear veterans fighting for compensation. By that time she was short of money and was only on an ordinary widow’s pension. She wasn’t entitled to the more generous RAF pension because she married her husband after his RAF service ended.
She decided to apply for a war pension because of her husband’s participation in the Christmas Island tests. But she was turned down. “They authorities were not interested in Ken, or me,” said Mrs Charney. “I told them all about his service during the war, but they said it wasn’t relevant. I appealed against their decision about the war pension, but again they turned me down flat. It seemed very harsh.”
Mrs Charney eventually wrote a letter to The Times which was published; a short while later she received a phone call from one of her husband’s old colleagues who was now a Harley Street consultant. He asked Mrs Charney to send all her husband’s medical notes to him. From those he was able to establish that Charney had died from leukaemia. After lengthy consideration, Mrs Charney was finally awarded a pension. “It’s not much, but it helps,” she said. “But this was no way for England to treat a hero.”
THE LONG DEATH
Ken Charney was just one of many nuclear veterans hit by illness and early death in the aftermath of their participation in nuclear bomb tests.
All over the country men were dying from radiogenic sicknesses as they drifted back from Australia and the Pacific. They went home to their towns and villages and were conveniently forgotten by the armed forces who were only too glad to see them disappear into obscurity.